ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog

"I love you," Kimmie's grandfather said, while gently releasing her hand and carefully pulling up the bedsheets around her thin shoulders. "Well I love your eyes," she said back, and planted a kiss squarely on his jaw. The grandfather gave her a wink, got up, and tipped his hat to me as he left the room. I felt a little awkward and concerned that I stepped into a personal moment, but Kimmie didn't say anything about it so we just quickly got to the business of therapy. Kimmie was a nineteen year old young adult who had cystic fibrosis and spent many long weeks in the hospital. I got to know her pretty well because she was admitted to the hospital several times each year. She landed on my caseload after her first hospitalization and the way we divided workload kept 'repeat' patients like her with the same therapist each time. She talked a lot about tranferring to an adult hospital but she knew her pulmonologist so well (and vice versa)that her...

Proposed rule changes for EI rates were published yesterday. The main issue for practitioners to be aware of is that you will no longer bill for a 'basic visit' which in most cases consists of a 30 minute visit. Instead you will bill in 15 minute increments - but what is important to understand is that the rate you were previously paid will now apply to a base visit length of 45 minutes. That means that if you are continuing with your standard 30 minute visits that you will experience an additional 33% rate cut. Whenever rule changes are proposed there needs to be impact statements - and NYS rulemakers have decided that cutting EI rates an additional 33% will result in increased job opportunities: The proposed rule change for home and community services to full 15 minute billing increments may result in a minimal increase of employment opportunities as providers will have to align time spent delivering services with the time assumptions used to establish the rates. It may als...

The March/April issue of AJOT has two articles on sensory integration that are worth discussing. The first is Verification and clarification of patterns of sensory integrative dysfunction (Mailloux, Mulligan, Smith Roley, et.al.). This article is another factor analysis study that has to be considered in the context of a number of other studies including Ayres (1989) original cluster and factor analyses that went into SIPT standardization, Mulligan's 1998 and 2000 cluster and factor analyses, and the critically appraised topic written by Davies and Tucker (2008). I'm not sure how many street level practitioners read cluster and factor analysis studies but I don't think that most people put this on top of their reading list. I think this is because we don't spend a lot of time educating practitioners on these methods and what they mean. I personally think that these statistical models are interesting but I also understand that they have a serious fundamental flaw in that...